Sunday, 26 February 2017

Soldering - Learning more every day

No idea what happened to February, I blinked and there it was gone! I almost missed my monthly blog and just scraped in by the skin of my teeth with 2 days left in the month!

So what has been happening here then. Well I have continued my love affair with copper and solder and been teaching myself (with the help of my hubby) to solder. Hubs used to repair video cameras before he retired so is a whiz at soldering, so when I asked him to teach me off he went up to the loft and brought down this beastie.

Needless to say it scared the heck out of me, but I pulled my big girl pants up and after watching him for a while I had a go. Took several attempts to learn the technique without getting burnt, over melting the solder or making a big mess lol!. and eventually we found that this kit was a bit overkill and instead swapped to his pyro pen which gives off a more gentle heat and you don't actually need to touch the metal with it.

I used basic lead free solder with 4% silver for now, which is fine for what I am doing as it's not actually on the outside of the metal and only being used to fuse the pieces together. I'm hoping to progress onto silver though once I'm actually brave enough to use the proper flame! Once fused I just clean and take my hammer to it.

The top right hand square became some pretty components with linear hammer texture. After sanding cutting and drilling they were used in these earrings, paired with turquoise tube beads.

Being able to fuse metal together now has opened up a whole new world in terms of design so I have been busy drawing designs on my i-pad for future projects, this is one of my favourites that I made this weekend

Using the same basic design I also made this one, thinking of calling it the bubble collection as I can see me making several things in this design, already have another three things with this design on my sketch pad.

You can see these and other new designs at my new Folksy Shop Max Pring Jewellery (link is just up on the right hand side of the screen) which I set up last weekend. Paper, Chains & Beads will continue to run but will be mainly for Scrapbooks and Art.